Using the Microcontroller ESP8266 for automation tasks for the IoT

Down the Line

This brief introduction shows how simple it is to program the ESP8266. Nonetheless these first examples are not representative of the potential that the small computer has to offer. In the next parts of this series we will examine the multitude of possibilities you can look forward to from Team ESP8266/Raspberry Pi. In the next issue of Raspberry Pi Geek we will be measuring the air humidity and temperature with the help of an AM2321 , using a mini web server running on the ESP8266.

We will also look at security, vulnerability to failures and the integration of these kinds of components into your home's infrastructure. In the meantime, you can perform interesting experiments using the basic ideas presented in this article and our examples from the Arduino development environment. We hope you have fun.

TIP

The Arduino IDE archive was compressed with the program XZ. In case the tar still does not recognize this program, you will need to install the xz-utils package. Under Debian and its derivatives, this is done via the sudo apt-get install xz-utils command. Next you should extract the Arduino IDE using:

$ tar xfvj arduino-1.6.7-linux64.tar.xz

The v ("verbose") option has tar output the names of the processed files as they are decompressed. The -j option informs the tool that the relevant archive exists in XZ format.